>>4003875No I said that Von Braun accelerated the US space program, he became a naturalized US citizen by the time he designed the Saturn V's and he merely led the team and directed them, there were several dozen US scientists working the Apollo program as well. But without him the Russkies might have made it to the Moon before we did and history would have been very different if the USSR won the space race. The idea of placing flammable propellant in a controlled burn to make an object fly is generally credited to the ancient Chinese schematics, the guy to think of using a rocket to fly into space was a Russian, the ones to first send any man-made object into space was the Nazis in 1942 (Von Braun's V2 program sent a rocket into space for a short time but it did nothing, just went into space and fell back down), Russian sent first satellite and man into space, while US sent first person to Mars and built the first Space Plane and sent the first rovers to other planets and sent the first satellite beyond our solar system (Voyagers 1 & 2) and a bunch of other things.
